For those of you who are acquainted with the Downtown Champaign’s many breweries and brews, it should be no surprise that the Columbia St. Coffee Stout, a collaboration between Columbia Street Roastery and The Blind Pig, was named one of the best beers of the Chicago Beer Festival by PorchDrinking.com, a fairly prominent beer blog.
The Chicago Beer Festival is an annual event, hosted at The Field Museum, which features loads of different brews from all around – pitting the Columbia St. Coffee Stout against formidable competition.
For more info, check out what Porch Drinking had to say below, and read their full article here.
You probably just read that beer and brewery and probably have no idea who they are. Don’t worry you’re not alone. This small brewery in Champaign, Ill. made my favorite coffee beer of the entire event.
This isn’t a big barrel-aged stout. In fact it’s only 5.4% ABV, what made this beer phenomenal is the strong coffee flavor balanced with the characteristics of a classic stout. On UnTappd they said there’s about 1/4 cup of coffee per pint and I believe it.
There’s so much coffee flavor in this beer, in a blind taste test you might think it’s just coffee and not beer. Bling Pig is Champaign’s first all-grain brewery since the prohibition era.
(Photo by Eric Dirksen)